Recurring revenue, and the cost that recurs against it.

“ARR is up twenty percent. Hosting is up forty.”

Gross margin in software is decided by cost to serve, and cost to serve is the line least likely to have an owner. Cloud spend in particular grows by accretion — nobody decides it, everybody adds to it.

ARR
net revenue retention
cost to serve
committed use
churn
capitalized R&D
seat utilization
gross margin

Your words, not ours.

Where it concentrates here

Five places the money tends to go in technology and SaaS. Each one is concentrated — a single agreement, a single queue, a single account nobody reviews — which is why sampling walks straight past them.

Non-production environments running continuously at production scale, because turning them off is somebody's job and nobody's priority.
Committed-use and reserved capacity purchased against a forecast that has since changed, so the commitment and the usage have quietly diverged.
Seats sold against seats actually active, on both sides — customers overpaying and renewing on inertia, and internal tools bought per head and used by a fraction.
Support tickets clustering on a small number of product defects, funded as support cost rather than fixed as engineering cost.
Auto-renewing customer contracts with uplift caps that were never applied.

Not every technology and SaaS is the same business

B2B SaaS with sales-led motionDiscounting delegated to reps, with concessions granted per deal and never aggregated into what the price book actually is.
Usage and consumption pricingRevenue that moves with customer behavior while the cost base moves with infrastructure, and the two are forecast separately.
Vertical and regulated softwareCompliance obligations inherited from customers, absorbed as engineering cost and never priced into the contract.
Services-heavy softwareImplementation quoted as a fixed fee to win the license, delivered at a loss, and reported inside a blended gross margin that hides it.

Where this data actually lives

Stripe, Chargebee or Recurly for billing; a spreadsheet for anything the billing system could not model
Salesforce or HubSpot holding contract terms that the billing system does not share
AWS, GCP or Azure, with cost allocation tags that were applied to some resources
A data warehouse where ARR is calculated one way and the board pack another

Named because it changes what the intake asks for. An extract from one of these has known gaps, and the review is built around them rather than surprised by them.

Reported in your numbers, not ours

net revenue retention
gross margin by product
CAC payback
cost to serve per customer
discount depth
cloud cost per account
implementation margin
ARR bridge

The obligations that set the deadlines

SOC 2 Type II, and what maintaining it actually costs per year
Sales tax and economic nexus on software across states — a common unbooked liability
Data processing agreements and sub-processor disclosure to customers
Revenue recognition under ASC 606, especially where implementation is bundled

What the review would ask you for

8 requests written for technology and SaaS and asked of nobody else — 3 of them core. They sit alongside the operating spine every business has — finance, revenue, receivables, payables, contracts, people, IT, operations, risk, commercial and governance — which is 107 further requests.

ARR or MRR movement Core New, expansion, contraction and churn by month.
Churn and retention Core Logo and revenue, with reasons where captured.
Cost to serve Core Hosting, support and success cost per customer or per seat.
Cloud spend by service and environment With committed-use and reserved commitments. Non-production environments running at production scale is routine.
R&D spend and capitalization policy What is capitalized, on what basis.
Product usage against entitlement Seats sold versus seats active.
Support ticket volume by cause Repeat causes are product cost, not support cost.
Customer contracts Term, auto-renewal, uplift caps and notice.

Anything you do not have can be skipped in one click, with a reason. The intake is completed in the client portal, which saves each answer as it is given and can be returned to as often as you like.

When this stops being interesting and becomes urgent

A funding round or an acquisition, where net revenue retention is recalculated by someone else
Cloud spend growing faster than revenue with no unit-cost view
A large renewal at risk, without knowing whether that customer was ever profitable
A sales tax notice from a state you did not know you had nexus in

Who this involves

Signs it: CEO or CFO
Resists it: Sales leadership, whose discounting becomes visible in aggregate
Has been asking for it: Finance and RevOps, who have been reconciling by hand

Who commissions it

CFOs, COOs and VPs of engineering. Phase one is priced before phase two is discussed, the report is yours either way, and we take no vendor commissions or referral fees on anything we recommend.

See the proposal and the price Talk it through first

The proposal sets out the sequence week by week, what we would need from you, and what it costs for your number of operating units. No call required to see the number.

Closest to this

Operations that share more with technology and SaaS than the sector label suggests.